When I interview a woman, at some point I always say: “Tell me the story of your mother’s life.” Rarely is the response a long one. After a few paragraphs, most women in my experience veer away. Without being conscious of what they are doing, they will begin to tell me about their father instead, and they have large quantities of details about his life. In part, this is because men’s lives were more public; it was father’s day that was discussed around the dinner table, not mother’s, and it was the father’s actions that brought glory to the family. Another reason is that we all feel strongly about our mothers, and in the case of women, those feelings are frequently conflicted ones. Few of the many women who have told me their stories were able to muster many details about their mothers’ girlhoods, what their youthful aspirations had been, what they had imagined their futures would be like, how they felt or what they thought about what their lives had in fact become. Few women could tell me what challenges their mothers had faced, what turnings their lives had taken, what choices they had made and what those choices cost them.
     Eva Margolinsky is an exception to this pattern. Perhaps Eva is more aware of her mother because she lost her at an early age, before adolescence introduced the conflicts and the guilt that frequently tarnish the mother-daughter relationship. Eva’s memory focuses on the courage of her mother and her grandmother’s courage that proved a valuable legacy that Eva herself needed during another, later war.

EVA MARGOLINSKY
Heroines Without Medals

Immediately after the war started in August, 1914, the Russians overran East Prussia where my family lived. They shot people and destroyed villages, including the little town where my grandfather lived. We saw the villages burning from our farm in the first few days of the war. I was eight years old.
     My father had to go to war right away. My mother was left to care for three children and two old people, her mother and my father’s father, and our farm. One day we heard that Russian soldiers were in the neighborhood. We stayed inside the house and were very afraid. A patrol came to our farm and stopped stopped in front of our house. There were ten soldiers on horseback.
     My grandmother was a widow, a dressmaker without a sewing machine because she did everything by hand. She had courage, and she walked out of the house to meet the Russians. Attached to our farm we had a little cafe, the only one in the area, and my grandmother approached the soldiers as if they were customers. “What can we do for you?” she asked. The soldiers could have shot her right away, but they didn’t. They weren’t nice to her or polite, but they seemed reasonable. They said they only wanted bread and milk. She gave them milk and bread.
     The Russians were looking for German soldiers and for weapons. They came inside our house. We had to stand with our hands up in the air while they searched under the beds and in the closets. They could have killed us, or done other terrible things. Soldiers do cruel things just because they can, and we were all terrified, even my grandmother and my mother. But the Russian soldiers didn’t hurt us. When they didn’t find anything, the patrol rode away—only they left two soldiers behind to watch us.
     Later on that same day, a group of German soldiers came to the house. They were half-drunk, but even so they found the two Russians and shot them. Then they went away, but they left the two dead Russians behind. We knew that the Russians would kill us if they came back and found their soldiers dead, so we hid the bodies under straw in the barn. The next day we got some people from the village to help us, and we buried the Russians. We gave them a real burial with a Russian cross because my grandmother said it was the right thing to do. This happened in the first few days of the war.
     The Russians were all over the countryside. Because the situation was so dangerous, my mother decided to distribute the whole family to relatives. My seven-year-old sister and I were to go to her brother, who was a pharmacist in Berlin. My youngest sister was to go with another uncle, my grandmother went to a different uncle, and my grandfather went to other relatives in West Prussia.
     We couldn’t get away until the beginning of September. My grandfather’s housekeeper traveled with my sister and me part of the way. Our village was very small and to catch a train we had to travel by horse and carriage to the next town. My mother gave each one of us a little bundle. In it was something to eat and something to wear in case we had to run away and scatter in different directions. We were very lucky because we caught the last train to Berlin and we didn’t have any trouble with soldiers on the trip. My grandfather’s housekeeper stayed with us until we met my uncle at a certain station, and then he took over.
     My sister and I were two little girls from a small village, and for us Berlin was a glamorous and exciting place. We had such a wonderful time that we almost forgot about the war. My uncle was recently married, and our new aunt, who was just twenty years old, was vivacious and playful and she doted on my sister and me. She bought us new dresses, and she got us new hairdos, and she took us to school. People were very nice to us because they knew we came from a dangerous situation.
     In the spring of 1915, as soon as my mother believed it was safe enough, she came to Berlin to get us. On the way home, we could hear the thunder of the cannons as General Hindenberg and the German army drove the Russians back. I remember a night when the Russians were retreating. It was raining very hard, and all night the Russians were marching back to Russia. There were big lakes and big woods, and many Russians drowned. People from the villages found the bodies.
     All through the war years, my mother took care of the farm by herself. I was the eldest, but instead of keeping me to help her, as soon as I came home from Berlin she sent me to Allenstein to go to school. Our house was big, our farm was large with a big garden to plant and harvest, and lots of animals to take care of. She kept everything going herself. I tell you, there were hundreds of things she had to do, and it was very difficult because she had almost no help. At the farm we had no electricity and no running water. If she needed water, she had to pump it from a well and carry it. For heat we had only a big stone stove in the kitchen. My mother had to cut the wood for the stove, and carry it into the house. My mother baked all the bread that we ate herself. She ran a kosher kitchen, and while we had chickens and other livestock, all that had to be taken to the next town to be slaughtered kosher. We had two horses. The best horse my mother had to give to the Army; the other one was old. The government sent her one captured horse from the war, but it was a race horse and no good for work on a farm. Every time my mother went into town, that horse would get frightened at the smell of blood around the slaughterhouse and give her a fight.
     My mother was a tiny woman, and she was very handsome with long, black hair, such long hair that she could sit on it. She was born in a small village not far from our farm. Her brother had seen to it that she got some education, and in our home we had all the classical books. She made wonderful poems and she played the violin, only once the war came she had no more time for those things.
     My father served in the artillery for four years. He fought in Russia, then he was sent back to Germany to be trained on a new cannon, and then he was sent to fight in France. In 1918 he was wounded in a big offensive and was hospitalized. When the war was over my father came home. Because of my mother’s hard work, everything on the farm was fine. But my father had been shot in the knee, and he couldn’t ride anymore. To manage a farm you had to be able to ride a horse, and so my parents sold the farm and moved to middle Germany to a town called Halberstat.
     My father was a war hero. But nobody gave my mother any medals. All through the war years she took care of the family and the farm. When the war was over, everything was fine, everything except her. Three years later, she died.
     That war was so unnecessary, so unnecessary, and because of it I lost my mother.

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